Back on His Feet

One week after the 2013 Boston Marathon, where Bill Iffrig literally descended into the national consciousness, he is back home in Lake Stevens, Washington. On this flawless, bright blue morning of high spring, a continent removed from the carnage, Iffrig sits quietly in the living room of the house that he built 49 years ago with his own hands.

When the first of the two Boston Marathon bombs detonated on April 15, Iffrig, 78, was knocked off his feet, and the image of his wobbling yet oddly graceful collapse played in a searing, continual loop on video screens around the world. A moment after the first explosion, a Boston Globe photographer snapped a picture of three police officers rearing over Iffrig, who, although obviously stunned, was about to stand and finish his marathon (his official time was 4:03:47, fourth-best in his age group). The photograph became an instant, eloquent classic, its composition recalling that of the one depicting Marines lifting the U.S. flag over Iwo Jima.

Media stars such as Piers Morgan and George Stephanopoulos interviewed Iffrig, who calmly responded to their questions in a workingman's plainsong syntax. It was as if an avatar from an earlier, more coherent era—a Cold War America of clear-cut enemies, mighty factories, and full employment—had magically appeared to reassure his countrymen in the nation's blackest moment since 9/11. In his speech at the interfaith memorial service in Boston, President Obama lauded the marathoner. "Like Bill Iffrig, 78 years old—the runner in the orange tank top who we all saw get knocked down by the blast—we may be momentarily knocked off our feet, but we'll pick ourselves up."

Three days ago, Iffrig and his wife, Donna, flew home from Boston to a modest local reception and more media interviews. Yesterday afternoon, finally, the fuss relented enough for Iffrig to catch up on his yard work. "It rained like crazy when we were away, and our grass must have grown three inches," he says, glancing out the window to his front lawn and, in the distance, the jagged peaks of the Olympic Peninsula. "A lot of my neighbors hire a yard service, and that's fine," he continues. "But I like to cut the grass myself. I've always had a lot of energy. I'm not much of one for sitting around. I get home after a 10-mile run, and I look forward to mowing the lawn."

In the space of this spectral week, it's already become commonplace that the terrorists "picked the wrong city" when they bombed the Boston Marathon. To take the first difficult step beyond the wreckage, by contrast, fate has appeared to have chosen the right man. A man who, amid the hyperconnected information overload of the crisis, quietly and competently attends to matters under his control: mowing his lawn; taking care of the people close to him; standing up and finishing his marathon.

"We're always saying that we want to grow up to be Bill Iffrig," says Doug Beyerlein, one of Iffrig's regular 60-something training partners. "We look up to Bill as a totally amazing runner, but he's an even more remarkable man. Out on long runs, we're always telling each other that someday, somehow, the world will finally recognize Bill. The irony is that it happened under these awful circumstances."

THE RESPITE from the media doesn't last long. A truck from KIRO 7 Eyewitness News in nearby Seattle appears in the driveway. The doorbell rings, and although the visit is a surprise, Iffrig politely welcomes a young reporter, Lee Stoll, and her cameraman.

Stoll chatters effusively, bestowing full-blown celebrity treatment on Iffrig, who seems bemused by the attention. Straight-backed and craggy-faced, Iffrig is a barrel-chested man with hard, big hands formed by 42 years in the paper mills that once lined the waterfront of nearby Everett. His brown eyes are set off by thick brows. He's wearing Levi's, a plaid flannel shirt, and a pair of Brooks running shoes; but for the latter, a uniform the baby-boom generation adopted in imitation of working men like Iffrig. Remarkably supple for his years, he seems taller than his five feet 10 inches.

The reporter and cameraman set up in the living room. Iffrig sits in his favorite chair, beside the picture window offering a spectacular view looking west across the Snohomish River delta to the Olympics, and recalls selecting the site for this house back in 1964. He'd eagerly entered the mills straight out of high school, he explains. Iffrig and Donna married when they both were 20 and became parents soon after. He worked on the carpenter's crew at Weyerhaeuser for 20 years, until the plant closed, and later as a mason for a facility operated by the Scott Paper Company.

"It was good, hard work but it didn't tire me out," Iffrig says. "I was 30 years old, in my prime. I found this plot of land on the ridge—there were only a few other houses up here then—and I bought the lot for $3,000. You couldn't do that sort of thing now."

Each afternoon he'd punch out at the mill and head to the construction site, building the 2,400-square-foot house solitarily. He framed and plumbed and wired, poured concrete and set rebar, working deep into the night by arc light and rising at 5 the next morning to punch in at the mill and do it all again. "On some winter nights, in the rain and dark, I'd climb a ladder and wonder, My gosh, what have I gotten myself into?"

Mostly, however, Iffrig loved the work. "I had good rain gear, and even on the worst nights I never got too bothered by the cold, because I enjoyed what I was doing," he says. "It took me one year, working every night and weekend. We've lived here ever since."

"WE'RE READY, BILL," Stoll says. Iffrig's story pivots from the 1960s—a time to build, in the parlance of Ecclesiastes—to the events of last week, a time of seemingly biblical breakdown. Stoll asks him to hold up the copy of Sports Illustrated, the issue with the photo of Iffrig and the three cops on its cover.

"My friends tell me you can't find this magazine anywhere around Everett," he mentions to Stoll. "They're all sold out."

He explains that the flight attendant on the plane from Boston had given him this copy—along with a complimentary meal and glass of wine. Iffrig made a point of announcing the perks to his friend and training partner Steve Hamilton, who had also run the marathon and was sitting a few rows back on the same flight. Hamilton had shaken his head in mock disgust. "Hell, Bill," he said. "All you did was fall down."

Which is pretty much what Iffrig tells the Seattle TV people. It's the same story he's told many times over the last week, affording each reporter equal respect and consideration, whether it's Anderson Cooper from CNN or a sportswriter from the local Daily Herald.

"The day started good, a perfect day to run," Iffrig says. "I had trained good for the race, four solid months hitting 40 to 50 miles a week. I'd run Boston the year before, when it was so darn hot, and I just had an awful day. It took me over seven hours to finish that 2012 race. Well, last Monday felt as good as last year had been tough."

Iffrig started conservatively, picking up his pace in the second half. "I was shooting for a 3:40—a little better than my qualifier. I was coming in at around four hours, which was still okay. Then I made that last turn onto Boylston."

He entered that electric, thrilling corridor of noise and color, where thousands of spectators jam the sidewalks, cheering marathoners to the finish in front of the Boston Public Library. "I'd been out on the course for four hours, and now I was ready to finish this thing," Iffrig says. "I was running close to the left-hand curb. There were other runners around me, but none were too close. I was just about to the line, maybe 20 yards away, when I got hit by this wall of noise. It was the loudest thing I'd ever heard. I immediately thought of a bomb—the extremists had set off a bomb. My body reacted and my legs just went like spaghetti. I felt myself falling to the pavement. As I fell I thought, This might be it. This will be the end of me."

Listening to Iffrig recount his fall, you can't help mentally replaying the video of the moment, which introduced the Boston Marathon bombing to the world. It shows a group of about a dozen runners moving down the 30-foot width of Boylston. You can see Iffrig at the top of the screen, in his orange singlet, moving in a loping, elastic stride, only his silver hair betraying his age. Suddenly, a white percussive cloud spurts from the crowd on the sidewalk, and the force field of the blast envelops him. The collapse ensues over a step or two.

He wobbles as he absorbs the first shock wave, as if his body and psyche were so locked into the act of running that he can't let go. Then he begins to topple. His left leg gives way and he slowly pitches forward, torquing slightly to his right, crumpling in a motion at once yielding and defiant.

"Bill was undulating as he went down," says Debbie St. Marie, the wife of Steve Hamilton. "And on the ground, in that photo, he seems to be holding himself—almost embracing his body—in this sort of respectful way."

In years ahead, Americans will recall where they were when they first saw the video image of Iffrig's fall, just as they remember learning about the JFK assassination and 9/11. One exception, ironically, will be Bill Iffrig, the runner in the orange singlet, who lived the moment.

"I hit the pavement and sat there for a while," Iffrig tells the Seattle TV reporter. "The noise and impact of the explosion had stunned me. I just sort of laid there all rummy-dummy. I didn't feel any pain and I didn't see any blood. I saw these three cops running at me—the three in the picture—and one of them asked if I was okay. I nodded my head yes. Now I was thinking, Maybe I'm all right. I'm not going to die today."

If he wasn't going to die, then Iffrig would continue following the line of a long and steadfast American life. Since he never considered not finishing, you could say that his decision to take the hand of a race official, stand up, and finish the race was really no decision at all, but merely a reflex, little more than another impulse in a day ruled by one deliberate act and thousands of instances of chance. Or you might recognize that Iffrig had been training for nearly 80 years for this moment, accruing courage and endurance in workaday deposits. It never occurred to the three cops in the photo not to rush toward the fallen runner, and it never occurred to Iffrig not to finish what he'd started.

IN THE WEEK SINCE the bombings, anyone even remotely related to the marathon or Boston has been obsessed with questions of "what if?" When he first learned of the attack, for instance, Doug Beyerlein had been driving home after a training run. He raced home and anxiously checked on his computer for the shoe-chip finish times of Hamilton, Patrick McKilligan, and Iffrig.

"At first I was relieved," Beyerlein recalls. "I saw that Bill, the slowest of our group, had finished around 4:04. When the bombs went off, the finish line clock said 4:09. I assumed that Bill would've been safely into the finish chute at that point. Then when I watched the video, and recognized that the runner who'd fallen was Bill, it didn't make sense."

Later, Beyerlein says, he learned that it had taken Iffrig almost six minutes to cross the starting line in Hopkinton, which explained the difference between the clock time and the chip time. "What if Bill had crossed the starting line just a moment sooner, or a moment later?" Beyerlein says. "He might not be with us today. Or he might be safe, but his picture wouldn't be on Sports Illustrated."

You'd think that Iffrig, of all people, would be haunted by a hundred such hypothetical questions. But that's not the case. He says that he's been sleeping soundly since the marathon. He sustained a scraped knee and some hearing loss that may last; mostly, though, he's pained by the suffering of the victims. He reports no survivor's guilt. "I haven't questioned why I was there," he says. "What good would that do me, or any of the poor people who got hurt? It happened because it happened."

However, one "what if?" does tug at him. Before the marathon, Iffrig and Donna discussed where they'd meet after the race (Iffrig doesn't use a cell phone). Since it was a sunny day, Donna thought she might go down to the Boylston Street sidewalk and watch her husband complete his third Boston Marathon (along with running the 2012 and 2013 editions, Iffrig, at age 50, ran the 1985 Boston in 3:11:46). But they ultimately decided that, because of the crowds, it would be better to meet back in their hotel room.

That's where Iffrig found his wife, frantic with worry, about 30 minutes after he crossed the finish line. The TV was just starting to report the terrible news—and to air the video of the falling runner in the orange singlet, whom she recognized right away. Donna and Bill thanked God for their good fortune. What if she had watched the finish on Boylston Street instead of in the hotel?

The couple embraced, cried, and talked. A few minutes later Donna's cell phone started to buzz, and within minutes her voicemail box was full.

"THE AMAZING THING about Bill, you can be his close friend, you can run beside him for years, and not know a fraction of all that he's accomplished during his life," says Woody Harris, a 63-year-old optometrist and member of the Port Gardner Bay Runners, Iffrig's training group. "The man is unfailingly kind and humble. In all the time I've known him, I've never seen him angry or discouraged, I've never heard him spontaneously talk about himself, and I've never seen him quit."

It's late Wednesday morning, two days after the TV interview at Iffrig's home, and a few members of the group are meeting for a track workout at the Everett Memorial Stadium complex, next to the city's minor-league baseball park, not far from the waterfront where the great mills once steamed around the clock, taking in raw timber from the Pacific Northwest rain forests and pumping out paper towels and toilet paper. The stadium is also fairly close to the neighborhood where Iffrig grew up. His father, Clarence, whose own father immigrated to the U.S. from Germany around 1904, worked for a manufacturer of cast-iron wood-burning stoves.

Clarence bequeathed Iffrig both physical strength and, perhaps, his son's psychological drive. "I'm taller but built a lot like my dad," Iffrig says. "He was a strong, vigorous man, but he didn't take care of himself. He drank a good bit and never went to the doctor. He died of a stroke when he was 67. I decided I'd follow a different route."

Working in a paper mill and building a family home did not provide challenge enough; Iffrig began to climb mountains. Guiding backpacking trips for his son Mark's Boy Scout troop led Iffrig to the pursuit, which, during the 1960s and '70s, was the province of a pioneering handful of men and women. Iffrig developed into an accomplished technical climber who summited 65 of the 100 highest peaks in Washington. One day in 1978, Iffrig joined a few fellow climbers for a fitness run. They stopped just when he felt like he was getting started.

At age 42, Iffrig began to run regularly, covering a few miles in the early morning before punching in at the mill. He soon switched to running after work, when he could go as far as he pleased. A nephew, almost 20, told Iffrig about a local 10-K. He decided to give it a try.

Iffrig went out hard. "If I faded, so be it," Iffrig says. "That's always been my approach. Except for the marathon, that's pretty much how I run today."

He finished the race and looked around for his nephew, who crossed the line a few minutes later. "What are you doing here?" he said to Iffrig. "Did you drop out?" No, Iffrig said, he'd run the entire 6.2 miles. His nephew asked his time. "38:30," Iffrig said. "Is that good?"

THUS BEGAN a sterling, 36-year-and-counting career, during which Iffrig has run more than 46,000 miles, completed 45 marathons with a PR of 2:43:50, earned medals in 5-K, 10-K, and 8-K cross-country events at the World Masters Athletics Championships, and won dozens of track and road races outright.

"I can't really explain why I took to running," Iffrig says. "Coming to the sport from climbing, I guess I already had a pretty strong engine. I enjoy the competitive part, which you don't get with climbing." In both pursuits, however, Iffrig could precisely measure what he'd accomplished each day. For 40 years he's kept a detailed training and racing log, the volumes of which are neatly arranged in a small room next to his home's laundry.

Until his retirement in 1994, Iffrig fit running around his job at Scott Paper. Periodically, for maintenance, the plant would shut down production for a week. "That's when the masonry crew really got busy," Iffrig recalls. "We would climb up into the dryers and mixers to shore up the brickwork. It was a hot, close-quarters job, and we worked 11-hour shifts. During one of those weeks I also happened to be training for the Seattle Marathon. One night, I was dead-tired after work, but I just had to get in my 10 miles. I went to a track in the pouring rain and ran 40 laps in the dark. I was pretty committed in those days."

For the first decade of his running career, Iffrig would run three or four marathons a year, consistently in the 2:50-to-3:10 range. In the early 1990s, nursing a sore back, he embarked on a sabbatical from the distance that stretched for 19 years. He raced frequently at distances up to the half-marathon, placing increasingly higher in his age group, but mostly trained alone.

A few years ago, Beyerlein, Hamilton, and Harris—serious citizen-athletes approaching age 60—invited Iffrig to join their group's workouts. He had no trouble keeping up and quickly became a regular. Each April, a few members of the group would travel to Boston for the marathon; Iffrig listened wistfully to their stories when they returned home. One Monday in 2011, Iffrig moved a tad stiffly during a group tempo workout. Without telling anyone, he had run the Skagit Flats Marathon over the weekend. After nearly 20 years away from the distance, at age 77, Iffrig had notched a 3:42 marathon and his Boston qualifier.

"I started running in the late '70s, and Bill was already a legend in the Seattle-area running community," says Hamilton, 62, a retired surveyor for Snohomish County. "I really became aware of him in the early 1980s. Four friends and I had entered the Baker to Bellingham 55-Mile Relay. It was a tough course. We were all in our mid-30s, in good shape, and it still took a lot out of us. Bill, who was almost 50 at the time, ran it solo and won the individual competition outright, going 55 miles at a steady 7:30 pace. The guy is genetically gifted, and he's a ferocious worker. Put that together, and you have something special."

Iffrig, closing in on 80, shows no signs of slowing. Over the last year he adopted a low-fat diet and lost nearly 10 pounds, dropping from 164 to 155, and has started strength and flexibility training. "I suppose I could cut back on my training and racing, and not go quite so hard," he says. "But I feel good. I still like to clear my mind with a run every day, and I still like to compete. I don't know any other way. I guess I think about running the same way I thought back when I was building my house. The cold and the hurt didn't bother me because I enjoyed what I was doing so much."

Iffrig says his training group keeps him young. Hamilton agrees. "We horse around and keep him loose," he says. "And we benefit from being around him. Running an 800, I hear Iffrig closing behind me, and it pisses me off."

A few weeks ago, Beyerlein says, Iffrig took a bad spill during a trail run. "He popped right up and kept running. A person his age isn't supposed to do that. He's an inspiration. How can we whine about being sore or tired when Iffrig, 78 years old, is running right beside us?"

THE NOON HOUR APPROACHES and Iffrig shows up at the stadium. Hamilton and Beyerlein will knock out a series of 800-meter intervals; Iffrig, as part of his postmarathon recovery, plans to walk a few laps. Before starting today's work, Hamilton and Iffrig briefly discuss the bombings. A veteran of nine consecutive Boston Marathons who ran a 3:24 at last week's race, Hamilton acknowledges that, consciously and otherwise, he's been thinking constantly about the attack. "I just feel bad about it," he says. "Spectators and runners are part of the same family. We're responsible for each other. It was a relationship I never had to think about before. Now I'm aware of it, and I'm wondering if we can ever regain that mutual trust."

Iffrig, for his part, thinks in simpler terms. "It's the why of it that bothers me," he says. "Where did those boys' hate come from? How could they take it out on those innocent people?"

And then, more attuned to action than words, and more comfortable talking about what he can do rather than the way that he feels, Iffrig starts moving around the track. "I'll run more marathons," he says at the end of his first lap. "But after all that happened last week, I don't plan now to do another Boston."

Less than discouragement, Iffrig's reluctance to return to Boston may signal a sense of completion. Out of more than 23,000 runners at the 2013 Boston Marathon, the bombs knocked one to the earth in front of our eyes. On April 15, amid the carnage on Boylston Street, an agency beyond his ken assigned a job to Bill Iffrig. He had stood and delivered.

But that's a matter for the world to interpret and admire. Right now, he has two more laps to go in his workout. Later today, in his training log, Iffrig will carefully record his progress.

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